Abstract
This chapter provides a background to the science of biogeochemistry, examining its history, content, and relationship with other disciplines. This supports the novel approach of this book, which is to examine biogeochemistry from the perspective of its relationship with other disciplines, and thus illustrates its importance in current scientific research in the biological, environmental, and earth sciences. Biogeochemistry is an extremely broad, yet detailed subject, with a multidisciplinary, cross-disciplinary, and interdisciplinary focus. Although it is fundamentally a biological science, it is deeply rooted in the study of chemical elements and compounds and their spatial and temporal movements through global, regional, and local physical spaces. Its name, including the prefixes “geo” and “bio,” implies a concern with the earth sciences (e.g., geography, geology, geophysics, and geochemistry), the life sciences (e.g., biology, biogeography, biochemistry, and biophysics), and pure and environmental chemistry. With the word “chemistry” as the main stem word, biogeochemistry is conceived as a branch or an allied discipline of the chemical sciences. Currently, biogeochemistry has developed into a vast field of study, including studies of biological, chemical, and geological aspects of the environment, their interactions, and the chemical cycling between these spheres. This chapter examines the historical development of biogeochemistry and the chemical cycling of the main chemical elements. Biogeochemistry developed from the basic, earth, and environmental sciences during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and later included topics such as atmospheric chemistry, carbon cycling, climate change and weathering, biological sciences, and links between climate and the solid earth. Chemical elements studied included carbon (C), nitrogen (N), phosphorous (P), potassium (K), oxygen (O), iron (Fe), calcium (Ca), selenium (Se), sulfur (S), and mercury (Hg). Each of these elements is examined as a component of compounds that comprise and move through the lithosphere, atmosphere, hydrosphere, and biosphere. For example, common compounds that contain carbon include diamond, graphite, Carbon-14 (pure), calcium carbonate (CaCO3), and dolomite (CaMg(CO3)2). Compounds containing oxygen include carbon monoxide (CO), carbon dioxide (CO2), calcium hydroxide (Ca (OH)2, and calcium oxide (CaO), while those with nitrogen include ammonium (NH+4), nitrite (NO−2), nitrate (NO−3), nitrous oxide (N2O), and nitric oxide (NO). In recent decades, biogeochemistry has evolved into a complex discipline beyond the chemical bases of its development, including the broader issues of global chemical cycling, and the interfacial relations between the biosphere, lithosphere, hydrosphere, and atmosphere. This breadth is shared with the related sciences. This chapter, therefore, explores the rudiments of these relationships, for the greater detail of the later chapters.
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Campbell, M.O. (2023). Biogeochemistry and Its Complexity. In: Biogeochemistry and the Environment. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-47017-2_1
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